When 23-year-old Brandon headed from Massachusetts to the Bay Area in
mid-May to start work as a software engineer at Google, he opted out of
settling into an overpriced San Francisco apartment. Instead, he moved
into a 128-square-foot truck.
Business Insider reports:
The idea started to formulate while Brandon — who asked
to withhold his last name and photo to maintain his privacy on campus —
was interning at Google last summer and living in the cheapest corporate
housing offered: two bedrooms and four people for about $65 a night
(roughly $2,000 a month), he told Business Insider.
“I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the
apartment I was staying in — and I was almost never home,” he says.
“It’s really hard to justify throwing that kind of money away. You’re
essentially burning it — you’re not putting equity in anything and
you’re not building it up for a future — and that was really hard for me
to reconcile.” He started laying the groundwork for living out of a
truck immediately, as he knew he’d be returning to work full time in San
Francisco. A school year later, he was purchasing a 16-foot 2006 Ford
with 157,000 miles on it.
It cost him an even $10,000, which he paid up front with his signing
bonus. His projected “break-even point” is October 21, according to the
live-updating “savings clock” he created on his blog, “Thoughts from Inside the Box.”
His one fixed cost is truck insurance — $121 a month — as he doesn’t
use electricity, and his phone bill is handled by Google. “I don’t
actually own anything that needs to be plugged in,” he explains on his blog.
“The truck has a few built-in overhead lights, and I have a
motion-sensitive battery-powered lamp I use at night. I have a small
battery pack that I charge up at work every few days, and I use that to
charge my headphones and cellphone at night. My work laptop will last
the night on a charge, and then I charge it at work.”
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